The Carbon Neutral Design Project is a joint effort between members of SBSE, the AIA, and a private donor to provide practitioners, faculty, and students with the means to meet the 2030 Challenge.

The Carbon Neutral Design Project is a joint research effort between members of the Society of Building Science Educators (www.sbse.org), the American Institute of Architects (www.aia.org), and a private donor, the purpose of which is to provide practitioners, faculty, and students with the means to meet the 2030 Challenge (www.architecture2030.org), that is, to be able to design and construct buildings to a state of carbon neutrality by the year 2030.

The collective objective of this coalition of courses is to develop and submit highly-competitive Race to Zero projects.

Course Content: The Ball State University Department of Architecture has enrolled four teams in the 2017 Race to Zero student design competition sponsored by the US Department of Energy. These teams will look at the four building typologies established for the contest: Suburban Single-Family; Urban Single-Family; Attached Housing; and Small Multifamily. Prof. Tom Collins' section of ARCH 501 will take the lead in developing the architectural solutions that will be entered into the competition.

The Sun Angle Calculator is a handy tool that provides a relatively simple method of determining solar geometry variables for architectural design, such as designing shading devices or locating the position of the sun relative to a particular latitude and time.

Pilkington Glass has kindly granted permission to SBSE to reproduce and distribute the Pilkington Sun Angle Calculator. This is a fantastic graphical design and analysis tool beloved by thousands of architects and engineers. Information on ordering copies of the Sun Angle Calculator and accessing the online manual "Designing with the Pilkington Sun Angle Calculator" will be found on the

The SBSE version of the Malcolm Wells Environmental Checklist is available in multiple languages.

A Regeneration-Based Checklist for Design and Construction

If you would like to volunteer to translate the checklist into another language, download the original Excel version. Please send the translated version to Bruce Haglund for posting. Please have at least one other person check your translation to ensure accuracy.

A set of lecture slides to introduce roles and behavior styles to form more effective teams.

I've learned over the years that I get better results from teams, if they know more about team building. I thus spend some time at the beginning of this course when forming teams explaining about effective team building. I follow the concept by the Effectiveness Institute, but there are numerous other systems equally effective.

A project consisting of a series of exercises related to your choices as a consumer of energy and a purchaser of products that consume energy.

This project consists of a series of exercises related to your choices as a consumer of energy and a purchaser of products that consume energy. Some of the exercises relate to your own personal energy choices, while others involve the design of a hypothetical small studio workspace located here in Eugene. This is an individual assignment. Discussions are encouraged, but any work you do must be on your own.

A lab assignment that asks students to perform an enclosure assessment by detecting sources of air leakage and thermal bridging utilizing infrared thermography

In this lab we ask students to perform an enclosure assessment by detecting sources of air leakage and thermal bridging in one of our buildings using infrared thermometers along with infrared thermography.

Air leaks show up different from thermal bridges although they can often look similar on infrared images. They learn to distinguish between the two types and assess the consequences to a building’s enclosure performance.

Lecture content for an introduction to the thermal performance of building enclosures

This lecture provides an introduction to thermal performance of building enclosures. It starts with repeating the principles of thermal heat transfer through the example of a fin tube radiator, which perfectly blends all these principles together. We then look at the different units for measuring heat and energy before moving to how we can characterize heat transfer through enclosure in a uniform way (U-Values and R-Values).

In this assignment I ask my students to study the schematic riser diagram and come up with question of

what they don't know,

what seems "strange" to them

and what is the purpose of each section.

They have to try on their own, then discuss in teams, and then develop strategies (identify methodologies) to find the best possible answers to their questions. This excercise starts in class, where I move from team to team to facilitate some of the questions for them to further their research.